I still use my System76 Gazelle Pro laptop I bought in 2014. The battery lasts for barely an hour but the machine still works great and is still my daily driver for my personal use. The plastic feels a bit cheap but it has held up just fine.
To an extent, I agree. At the same time, Karen may be in a similarly desperate situation. While the morally correct position would be to stand up to what is obviously wrong, Karen may need the paycheck to feed her kids. Karen herself is a row in a spreadsheet that the powers that be could replace in a heartbeat.
I'm not suggesting that this is any reason to support evil policies but I try to be sympathetic to struggles I may not be aware of.
https://www.openhab.org/ is a pretty established one (written in Java). Although if you're interested in one that isn't established and is very open to tweaking I've just refactored my home automation system and if other people were interested it would help my motivation to keep working on it (written in Go): https://github.com/alittlebrighter/igor
My apologies, I'm in Pittsburgh in the USA and currently making 90k just for front-end work. According to the research I've done, 120k is on the low end for senior devs across the nation and perhaps just right, maybe a tad high for my local area.
I'm mostly looking at remote jobs (There aren't a lot of openings at the smaller companies I'm applying to in Pittsburgh but of those I mostly haven't even gotten past the resume screen). I told them I was shooting for $120k/year although I was flexible. I've probably submitted 50ish applications so far.
This, I've gotten pretty fed up with my current company because management just hands out work with no real explanation. Even more frustrating is that any significant technical design work is done in closed door meetings where the only people invited are development and product managers.
I've stopped giving feedback and I'm nearly at a point where I've stopped being interested. It frees up my mind and motivates me to work on my own projects on nights and weekends so I can actually have a say.
I've found that most people are friendly enough to engage in light conversation. I agree that going any deeper than that has become much more difficult due to people becoming used to the barriers social media provides. In my experience though, I have to be willing to be authentic, and in a way vulnerable, before anybody else will open up. That is the only way to create real relationships IMO.
Good education should teach fundamental principles and theories that apply to every real world scenario within a domain. Unfortunately the push for "real world" education seems to have won in a lot of places. So you get people educated in how to solve very specific problems and are completely lost when any of the parameters are changed.
This was my experience with the job I'm at now. I was hired as a "full stack" developer and when I got here I learned I was the only one on my team comfortable working on the back-end. The team is small and very much the opposite of the ideal scenario he talks about in the article (people have their specialties and are only willing to pick up work within those specialties). This has actually given me an opportunity to create a niche for myself where I am able to jump into just about any project at any point in the stack.